Local opinion: Getting serious about global warming

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, humanity has been accumulating a debt to future generations. Unlike the debt created by the world’s bankers and politicians, it is a debt for which the laws of physics and chemistry demand repayment; a debt that cannot be forgiven, restructured, or ignored. It has been acquired by burning fossil fuels to extract the energy supplied by “ancient sunlight” to power our industrial civilization.

That debt takes the form of greenhouse gases (GHG) that have been accumulating in our atmosphere for the last 300 years. The most well-known GHG is carbon dioxide (CO2). The carbon that had been safely sequestered beneath the earth’s surface has been vaporized, adding to a growing blanket that traps the sun’s energy between the earth’s surface and space.

Scientists have known about the heat-trapping properties of CO2 since before electrification and the oil age began. But until the introduction of internal-combustion-engine-powered cars, there were too few of us burning too little fuel to seriously affect the world’s climate. Before the invention of the solar cell, aside from hydroelectricity there was little alternative to burning fuels to produce electricity.

The switch to gas-powered vehicles, on the other hand, was enabled by regulations that failed to account for the full cost of burning gasoline. The first cars were electric vehicles. The switch to ICE cars was to some extent a product of battery technology limitations. Before the introduction of ICE cars, gasoline was a waste byproduct of refining oil, dumped into rivers because it had no value. Once we started burning it, the waste product, CO2, was dumped into the atmosphere, where that not absorbed by the oceans still exists. There still is no charge for dumping CO2 into the air.

Instead of allowing it to continue baking the state, Arizona could be using its solar energy to produce the hydrogen that could see us through a lengthy grid outage. There are other shorter-term power-storage alternatives.

“Perfect” has become the enemy of “good enough.” For electric utilities, under the pretext of reliability, this translates to continuing to sell electricity produced by burning fossil fuels. For EV zealots this means rejecting plugin hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) because they can burn gas, even if 90% of the time they could run on electricity.

For all of us, adherence to the laws that govern the physical world will involve some personal changes. For example:

Driving EVs and renting on those few occasions when our destination exceeds the range of the EV. If this happens frequently, drive a PHEV.

Using mini split heat pumps to heat or cool just the rooms we are using, not the entire house.

The country and the world face an existential threat that has been building for centuries — and one that won’t go away for centuries even if we start “doing the right thing.” Like our pre-industrial ancestors, we must again become “…entirely dependent on the revenue of sunshine.”